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Welcome to OneLife Ministries. This site is designed to lead you prayerfully into a heart experience of Divine Presence, Who is Love. I hope persons of varied faith paths will find inspiration here. Please share this ministry with others, and please return soon. There is a new offering daily. And to be placed on the daily OneLife email list, to request notifications of new writings or submit prayer requests, write to briankwilcox@yahoo.com .
Blessings,
Brian Kenneth Wilcox MDiv, MFT, PhD
Interspiritual Pastor-Teacher, Author, Workshop Leader, Spiritual Counselor, and Chaplain.
You are invited to join Brian at his fellowship group on Facebook. The group is called OneLife Ministries – An Interspiritual Contemplative Fellowship. Hope to see you there. Blessings.
MYSTIC POEM
I am lost
somewhere in this night
amidst sounds of traffic
streaming through my window,
alone. I hear a song underneath
the ground rising to meet me, to share
secrets I have long denied, or maybe
could not see. Resonances of Truth
the Friend is whispering in my ear, words
my mind cannot translate, lyrics only
my heart can say "Yes" to.
*Brian Kenneth Wilcox. "Alone, Night." Jan 18, 2010.
REFLECTIONS
I have yearned for my own hermitage. I have been torn for many years between the solitary who vows to celibacy and focusing on the life of inner Devotion, and the man who has a home, is immersed in the world, and enjoys the love of a woman. At one time, one longing comes to the fore, at another time, the other. This is the tension between Brian the contemplative and Brian the active; the tension between longing to share the love of a woman, and to give heart only to the Divine Beloved. Presently, I live alone, but I have yet to take another vow, one to celibacy. Possibly, one day, possibly, not.
Yet, I have been to only one hermitage, where a friend lives in the rural wood of Scott, Georgia, at Greenbough House of Prayer. This is a small room, set off to itself and with a tiny restroom and little porch. This is his house, sitting among trees, as though to speak of the solitariness of the vocation to Quiet and Aloneness.
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What is a hermitage? And what is its inner message for us each who seek union with the Divine Love?
A hermitage is the solitary dwelling for a hermit. The apartness of it is stressed in that the word "hermit" derives from a word meaning "desert." And this is related to a word meaning "desolate." A hermit is a person who has chosen, for spiritual purposes, to live alone as a solitary, separate from others, even if interacting often in community. For instance, my friend Steve is an active worker and worshiper at Greenbough House of Prayer. Indeed, often he is very busy taking care of needs of persons in retreat, tending the garden, caring for the grounds, helping in preparation of meals, leading communal worship, and traveling into town to do grocery shopping. Also, Steve serves as pastor of a very small United Methodist congregation nearby. This group, last count, was of about ten persons.
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I, at times, think with humor that I might have been given a hermitage, but much unlike what I envisioned. I live alone, with two dogs, in an old halfway house. This is a transitional home for addicts. I am not an addict, but needed a place to live, and a kind woman in the community provided this at little rent. At first, I lived with three other men. In one week of time, they all went separate ways. I was alone again. When I am not outside, most of my time is spent in one room, where I eat, sleep, write, read, pray and meditate, communicate with friends via phone and computer, and listen to some music or watch a movie via a program on my computer - I do not watch TV. So, possibly, Spirit is giving me a taste of the hermitage life. It is more challenging than I anticipated, even for one who cherishes aloneness.
Yet, more important than any such outer space is the inner space. We could call this the Hermitage of the Heart. This is the inner Solitude, the Sanctum within. This is the practice, as the Hindu mystics have spoken: alone with the Alone. Most of us will never have a hermitage, or desire to have one, but we do yearn and seek an inner experience of Quiet and Apartness to nourish our spiritual lives and grow in compassion for the world.
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So, how does this practice of the Quiet, the Inner Hermitage, relate with our sharing among others within and outside this Quiet Time. Words of Thomas Merton are instructive and inspirational here:
Compassion and respect enable us to know the solitude of another by finding him in the intimacy of our own interior solitude. It discovers his secrets in our own secrets. Instead of consuming him with discretion, and thus frustrating all our own desires to show our love for him, if we respect the secrecy of his own interior loneliness, we are united with him in a friendship that makes us both grow in likeness to one another and to God. If I respect my brother's solitude, I will know his solitude by the reflection that it casts, through charity [Divine Love], upon the solitude of my own soul.
*Thomas Merton. No Man is an Island. "The Inward Solitude." 15:4.
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Therefore, interior solitude is not only that I might know the Divine more fully, more intimately, and be known in like return. We practice the Hermitage of the Heart to share a deeper secret of mutual sacredness with others. As I become more intimate with myself and God, I become more intimate with the other. Love shifts from emotion and mutual liking to a deepening undercurrent, ever-becoming more embracing, of an intimacy that fulfills itself within its own solitary-but-communal Nature. Then, two are literally in Love - speechless communion, being to being, in Being, a self-replenishing mutual withinness.
What have been the benefits you have enjoyed through a regular practice of Solitude? How has this enhanced your relationship with yourself? The Divine? Others? Feel free to share some of these blessings.
© OneLife Ministries. Jan 21, 2010.
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*OneLife Ministries is a ministry of Brian Kenneth Wilcox, SW Florida. Brian lives a vowed life and with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis. While within the Christian path, he is an ecumenical-interspiritual teacher, author, and chaplain. He is Senior Chaplain for the Charlotte County Jail, Punta Gorda, FL.
*Brian welcomes responses to his writings at briankwilcox@yahoo.com . Also, Brian is on Facebook: search Brian Kenneth Wilcox.
*You can order his book An Ache for Union from major booksellers.
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